Microsoft Research and
Microsoft

International Conference on Computational Photography, April 2011

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Top image is unblended collection of images, bottom is blended using the
technique described in this paper. This sequence is challenging as it
contains exposure, and lighting changes as well as moving objects. All
of these are handled automatically to produce a seamlessly blended result.

Abstract

We present a technique for fast Poisson blending and
gradient domain compositing. Instead of using a single
piecewise-smooth offset map to perform the blending,
we associate a separate map with each input source image.
Each individual offset map is itself smoothly varying
and can therefore be represented using a low-dimensional
spline. The resulting linear system is much smaller than
either the original Poisson system or the quadtree spline
approximation of a single (unified) offset map. We demonstrate
the speed and memory improvements available with
our system and apply it to large panoramas. We also show
how robustly modeling the multiplicative gain rather than
the offset between overlapping images leads to improved
results, and how adding a small amount of Laplacian pyramid
blending improves the results in areas of inconsistent
texture.